Smoking Gun
by Jamocha101
Summary: Sitting in a room chained to a wall with a badly-concussed Dick Grayson was not Jason's idea of a fun Friday night.
1. Chapter 1

Dick regained consciousness after what may have been half an hour.

Jason would be woe to admit that he was relieved, but the sound that his fellow vigilante's skull made upon a full-impact collision with metal would be reason alone to cause any vaguely sympathetic person alarm. The incident left Dick a nice, bloody gash on his temple that looked to be as deep as the Mariana's Trench, and a continuously expanding contusion that was every ghastly color of the rainbow.

When Dick first roused, he murmured something incoherent and then sucked in a big fat sip of air through his teeth as if suddenly realizing that amount of pain he was in, his entire body tensing in vindication for the obvious brain damage. His first instinct was to raise a hand to his indented cranium, but the effort to do so was quickly quashed when he realized that his hands were fastened by a chain behind his back—as were Jason's.

"Oh, _man,"_ Dick all but exhaled, looking for the world like he was having labor pains. "Shoulda gotten the license plate on the thing that hit me…"

Jason watched as his comrade struggled to let his eyes, which were no doubt sensitive to light, flicker open. "You all right?" he eventually asked. Stupid question.

If Dick processed the question, he didn't answer it. Instead he asked his own: "Where are we?"

Jason wasn't concussed, but even he didn't know how to answer that. What was supposed to be a normal night—the two of them walking around in their civvies, planning on shooting the shit at the cinema, maybe picking up a couple girls at a bar afterward—went south seven ways to Sunday in the span of probably ten minutes. One wrong turn down a shady back alley ("It's a shortcut," Dick had said) and the two vigilantes found themselves in an incredibly bad place at an incredibly bad time. Surrounded by a group of thugs, Jason figured they were just looking for a quick robbery or a senseless fight.

They ended up proving to be much more visceral than a bunch of petty criminals however, and put up a legitimate quarrel—wanting not to kill or steal, but to kidnap the two young men for god-knows-why. Jason figured that perhaps they wanted ransom captives, maybe for Gotham police headquarters—but regardless of their obscure motives, the fact was that they were no real match for the crimefighting duo, regardless of the quantitative advantage (there was eight of them). Kevlar costumes be damned.

But when Jason took on three of the mooks and one of them landed a surprisingly strong kick to his leg (which is now definitely broken) and Dick was momentarily distracted by the resultant agonized cry, one of the baddies who had been down for the count suddenly seized the precious moment and took a crowbar to his head in an MLB-style batter's swing. Grayson was out cold before he hit the ground.

Dually incapacitated, Dick and Jason ended up with burlap sacks thrown over their heads and were tossed into the back of a creepy white van—the kind that look they're made specifically for kidnapping purposes. Jason made sure to land some blows with his colorful vocabulary while his good kicking leg was out of commission. Next thing he knew, him and a slumbering Dick were thrown into a dimly-lit white-walled room, almost like a crude holding cell, with chains tethering them to the wall.

They sat there on the floor for at least thirty minutes, Dick unstirring, Jason stewing. That was, until Dick fought to make the ascent out of his comatose state.

After a moment of reflection upon all this, Jason grumpily answered his cohort's dazed inquiry: "Beats the hell out of me." He turned to get a good look at Dick's face for the first time since the latter rejoined the land of the living; frighteningly enough, even in the dim lighting, he looked—well, as if he had gotten hit in the head with a crowbar. His face was ashen, utterly drained of color except for the encrusted red that leaked out of the obnoxious gash where the metal connected, and the polychromatic bruise. Surely enough, the swelling was coming in with a vengeance. And if all that wasn't evidence enough of a pretty gnarly concussion, one of Dick's pupils was so dilated that it was markedly bigger than the other.

Jason's instinctive reaction was to suck in some air through his teeth. He wasn't easily perturbed, but something about those mismatched pupils in addition to the other obvious indicators of injury made him flinch. "Yikes."

Dick's own reaction time to that unhelpful remark was slow and dazed. His eyes and mouth drooped, making him look like a brain-dead zombie. "W-What, did I-?" he looked forward and tried to summon some recollection, tried to remember the words he wanted, looking to Jason as if he was contemplating the key to all the universe's extensive knowledge. "Did I get…hit in the head…?"

"Yes."

Dick never sounded more drunk. And Jason would know. "S'it bad…?"

"Yeah, it's pretty bad."

"Ugh…" the acrobat's head rolled back and connected with the wall, earning Dick another hiss of pain. Jason watched carefully, afraid that his comrade might keel over or begin to wretch—with head trauma like that, there was no telling what unpleasant symptoms would show up without proper medical attention, and Dick certainly looked incredibly ill. As it was, Jason was surprised that his elder brother had come around at all; a hit like that, maybe two inches to the left or three seconds quicker, could have easily killed him off.

But then again, the thugs that incited the encounter seemed adamant about keeping the duo alive. When the two of them were thrown into the van, Jason could hear one of the thugs in the vehicle's cab upbraiding the guy that had wielded the crowbar that dealt the sizable dent in his brother's skull; _"You idiot!"_ he had shouted, _"We need these boys alive!"_ God knew why the hell that was, but for Jason it was always throw the punches first, ask questions later.

Jason's thoughts were interrupted by Dick's slurred voice; "What…what happened?"

"You took a crowbar to the head from some thug in an alley," Jason explained, presuming that his brother's memory was as clear as mud. He couldn't but add a little quip; "And you always said _I_ have a thick skull."

Dick didn't so much as offer a good-natured chuckle. In fact, he didn't do anything to acknowledge that he had heard a single word his wayward sibling said. "Ugh, man…head feels like…s'in a vice…Did I get—did I get hit?"

Jason's brow knitted together. "Yeah. I _just_ said that."

"Y'did?"

"Literally ten seconds ago."

"Oh…I must, must be…"

"Concussed. We need to get you to a doctor." Jason jostled his shackles. "Soon as we get the hell out of this dump."

"I just need…just need…" Dick's head lolled back again and his eyes began to flutter as if he didn't have the strength to keep them open. His face, whiter and more drawn by the minute, began to go lax as he began to lose the battle to hang onto the waking world.

"Hey!" Jason extended his good leg and kicked Dick in the shin, earnig a yelp of pain. Jason felt (slightly) bad, but he knew that letting Dick pass out was a slippery slope. "Don't fall sleep," he demanded as Dick struggled to recover and searched like a blind man to establish eye contact. "I need you upright for when we get out of here. I got a bum leg, and there's no way I'm hauling your unconscious ass."

Dick's face suddenly morphed into a look of confusion and concern. "Your leg…what happened to your leg…?"

Jason's frown managed to get bigger. "We got mugged. In an alley. Remember?"

"Shit," Dick murmured. Jason almost chuckled. "Maybe that's why my head is…so…ah—"

"Just stay awake, alright? And if you have any brilliant insights on how to get out of here, lay it on me. I'm open to suggestions."

Dick never worked so hard to follow what somebody was saying to him in his life. It was as if everything Jay enunciated reached him three times slower after passing through a snow blower. He leaned his head back and squeezed his eyes shut, trying willfully to banish the confusion and the _incredible_ headache—more like a migraine, really, but turned up a few notches to add subwoofer-but his efforts were mostly fruitless. Miraculously, he managed to utter a question that wasn't totally unconstructive; "Did you see…who grabbed us?"

"There were eight guys in the alley," Jason answered. "I do remember what they looked like. Stupid bastards weren't wearing masks. But I have no idea where we are. They covered our faces with sacks until we were tossed in this broom closet.

"When…Bruce doesn't hear from us, he'll…he'll figure it out…"

At the mention of Bruce and the idea of him coming to his rescue, Jason felt a certain recognizable heat rise past his neck into his cheeks. His brow narrowed and he felt like barking out at Dick, but miraculously had the wherewithal to hold back for the moment. Nonetheless, he grunted through his teeth, "I forgot. Goldie keeps in touch."

Amazingly, of all times, Dick caught that and seemed to understand the implications. His brow knitted intensively together, but he wasn't able to rebuke the way he would have on a regular day. "What...?"

"Forget it."

Dick was unrelenting, even though his head lolled forward now as if his neck was a mere thread incapable of supporting the weight of his skull. "Jay—Jason—Bruce cares about you too."

"I said, forget it." Danger was creeping into Jason's voice.

Unfortunately for the junior former robin, his elder brother was characteristically unrelenting when it came to the subject of family; appropriately enough, it was unspokenly understood that he more or less functioned as the mediator between Bruce and his perpetually bickering children, to the extent that Alfred wouldn't intervene. Jason never understood Dick's insistence upon some kind of idealistic familial image, but, then again, nobody in the family was as idealistic as Dick. Jason himself was bent upon his angry and vengeful agenda; the cerebral Timothy Drake lacked his oldest brother's people skills; and, obviously, Damien (or the devil-spawn as Jason liked to call him) was much too good to bother trying to get along with anyone.

Jason was by far the most aloof, but one way or another, intermittently found himself drawn back to his connections with the "bat family," regardless of his efforts to severe them for good. But Dick was the only one he ever vaguely got along with, although they had their fair share of squabbles. Then again, Dick seemed to be the one that everyone universally got along with anyway.

"…cared."

The sound of his brother's hoarse voice took him out of his contemplations and he looked toward the concussed robin. He had been talking, but Jason was too deep in thought to notice. "What?"

"I said—" Dick suddenly cringed and hissed in pain, even though nothing changed as far as Jason could tell. Probably the repeating pangs of a migraine. "—that he—that Bruce—always cared. But you're just—too stubborn to see it."

"Oh, piss off." Jason said, rather harshly. One look at Dick, who was trying to incite reconciliation even while horrendously concussed, and the younger vigilante felt a small pang of regret—a feeling he wasn't used to. But even he could recognize that now might not be the best time for him to act like a dick toward his brother. Accordingly, he heaved a sigh and tried again:

"Look, I think it's cute how you try to 'bring the family together' or whatever, but it's beyond me, okay? I've got bigger fish to fry. Bruce had his chance."

Dick's eyes were closed again, but his eyebrows were furrowed in such a way that made it look like he was listening. When Jason was done speaking, his head lolled toward his voice and his eyelids fluttered as if he _tried_ to establish eye contact, but just couldn't. "Woulda thought…you v'all p'ple…would…b'lieve 'n s'cond chances…"

Jason couldn't help but feel the heat continue to rise in his face, but he managed to keep his—albeit, frustrated—voice at a reasonably calm level. "Why should I have given him the chance in the first place? He never cared, before or after. He's a farcical bastard, but you can't help but see the _good_ in _everyone_." He glared ahead, not looking at Dick, not needing to clarify the event to which "before or after" referred.

Dick was still hanging on to consciousness by a thread. "Jason, he…he _adopted_ you—"

"Don't you get it?" Jason angrily cut off, momentarily forgetting his inward pledge not to snarl at his brother just this very moment. "He didn't adopt me because he cared, or because he saw something in me. Bruce only took _me_ under his wing because he missed _you_."

There was a pause, and a sudden jolt of unfounded worry had Jason forgetting about his momentary acrimony and staring at Dick, who, too incapacitated to argue further (if he even understood what Jason had just said), was visibly losing strength and slackening off as darkness overtook him.

"Dick!" Can't fall asleep. Coma. Bad news.

The elevated volume of Jason's exclamation caused Dick to flinch as if he had been electrocuted. Recoiling as much as he could while shackled to the wall, the first robin kept his eyes squeezed shut and hissed in pain. Jason demanded again for his sibling to remain conscious, but the latter dazedly disregarded the instruction and murmured something akin to "five more minutes" as if he was being dragged out of bed for school.

Jason sighed in both frustration and egregious concern. There was no telling when those goons would be coming back to do whatever the hell it was they wanted to do with their captives, and with Dick in such a state, and Jason a lame mule, there was no way to fight back. They had to figure out how to get out, and fast; waiting for Bruce to figure it out might not be the wisest course of action, but the younger vigilante was one brain down and burdened with a nearly vegetated older brother.

"Bruce…"

The second Robin was once again jostled out of his thoughts by Dick's voice; he looked wide-eyed at his brother, seeing him attempt to keep his head upright and open his eyes, but neither function would cooperate. Fresh blood from the gash in his temple dripped off his chin, and his face somehow managed to go another shade whiter, from what Jason assumed was blood loss.

Dick continued; "…M'head…is… _killing_ me—"

The younger man was more worried now then he would ever admit. "Dick, it's _me_ , Jason."

"Unf…Is Alfred-? Have any aspirin?"

"You're not at the manor."

"Huh?" Dick finally got his eyes to open again, suddenly, but then seemed to instantly regret it as the photosensitivity sent another hit of pain through his skull. "Oh— _Jesus_. Did I get—hit in the head?"

Jason heaved a deep, resigning sigh. Dick was getting worse by the minute and the clock was ticking toward the seconds that escape would be made infinitely more difficult by the return of those mooks. There was no telling when their friends and family would notice that something was wrong, but Jason imagined it would take several more hours of their disappearance to cue them on, and he had the eerie feeling that it would be too late by then. Although, even if he did, within the next few minutes, miraculously figure out how to break himself and his brother out of there, they were both arrantly incapacitated—Dick with his head trauma that was worsening by the second and Jason with only one good leg—and it was looking like immobility would be keeping them grounded. Even if Dick _was_ able to walk—which it was looking progressively more like that would not be the case—there's no way in hell he would be able to help Jason given the state that he was in.

"Just stay awake," Jason found himself saying as his mind raced. "Don't pass out on me, alright?"

"S'ry, B.," Dick slurred. Now his eyes were rolling in the back of his head. "I j'st…have this… _killer_ head ache…"

"I'm not Bruce. I'm Jason."

"Who?"

"Jesus Christ." Jason's teeth ground together; now he was immensely concerned. Dick was talking nonsense, edging closer to an amnesiac episode; and, despite Jason's encouragement, there was no way he was going to be able to stay awake. Jay tried not to think of the worst scenario, but he was privy to the consequences of head trauma that goes untreated—not to mention that their kidnappers probably didn't plan on being particularly gentle.

Jason's head snapped forward when he heard footsteps approaching from the corridor right outside the hostage room; looks like time was running short. Speak of the devil.

"Shit. Shit. Shit."

Jason wasn't usually one to panic, and he wouldn't define his present preoccupation with the approaching hazard as just that, but damn if he didn't feel his cool slowly but indefinitely slipping through his fingers. Sparing another glance at Dick didn't help, as his elder brother now looked dead to the world—he lost the battle to hang on to consciousness and his injured head now hung listlessly to one side.

The footsteps paused right in front of the door and Jason looked forward in visceral anticipation, bearing his teeth like a feral dog. The sound of latches clicking and jostling alerted him to the unlocking of the door; Jason could see the outline of a large, brooding figure behind the frosted window.

"Dick!" he tried, to no avail. The first Robin was out cold. "Shit."

The door finally began to open and Jason's mind raced. Time to think of a plan, and fast.


	2. Chapter 2

_Tap. Tap. Tap._

 _"The Gotham City Police Department is partnering up with multiple investigative syndicates in neighboring counties to get to the bottom of a series of strange disappearances occurring all over the nation."_

 _Tap. Tap. Tap._

 _"While there appears to be a particular concentration of these cases on America's east coast, investigators are puzzled by the rapidity of the disappearances and the apparent lack of motive. At the moment, we are told that this recent upsurge is unprecedented within the last one hundred years of any of the affected municipalities' histories."_

 _Tap. Tap. Tap._

 _"All victims are between the ages of nine and fifteen and have one peculiar thing in common—a current or historical involvement with various acrobatic families in a wide variety of circuses and other performing organizations across the country."_

 _Tap. Tap. Tap._

"Would you stop that?"

Tim started at the sound of Bruce's even-toned, but vaguely agitated voice. He had been strangely on edge all night, and while that wasn't entirely unfounded on account of the copious amounts of caffeine he was known to ingest on a regular basis, it was apparent that something in particular was bothering him—and without realizing it, he had been repetitively striking one of his batarangs against the pillar on which he was leaning.

"Sorry," he apologized meekly, looking at the small metal weapon that he didn't even remember withdrawing from his utility belt. Him and Bruce were both clad in their vigilante uniforms, preparing to go on patrol, but the evening was being spent examining a series of crime patterns broadcasted on both the news and the internet.

Bruce didn't respond, but only turned back to the large monitors displaying the news anchor next to multiple web pages covering the same story. The ongoing disappearances of young male circus performers had become a hot-button issue in the last week, not the least because every investigator and police organization assigned to the case was utterly stumped. Every lead seemed to go cold. Batman took on an admirable series of kidnapping cases in his own time, but with reliable leads, no notes, and a continuingly increasing disappearance rate, it was hard to know where to start. The performing organizations and families of the victims were keeping strangely quiet to boot.

Tim caught onto the strange recurrences himself and reunited with Bruce as Red Robin to lend his own investigative skills. He was always happy to return to Gotham and work with his former mentor, but there was always _one_ dissuading factor that made his regular returns just a little less enjoyable—

"Is it the caffeine, or have you simply failed to develop the nerves of steel that you aspire to emulate, Drake?"

There it was.

Tim cringed, clutched the batarang and then turned on his heel and hurled it at Damien Wayne, the "resident ray of sunshine," as Dick sometimes liked to call him.

The batarang went a little wide by design and Damien, who likely expected the assault as him and Tim were no strangers to throwing objects at each other, dodged it easily. When the small weapon made its inevitable return, the current Robin caught it without looking behind him—a move meant clearly to show off his "enhanced sensory perception," as Tim perceived. The latter rolled his eyes.

"Not in the mood tonight, bat brat."

"Seems like unfounded animosity at such an innocent inquiry."

"Stuff it," Tim deadpanned, glaring daggers as Damien approached the monitors.

"It's never tactically sound to participate on a mission while emotionally compromised."

"I'm _not_ emotionally compromised. You're just annoying."

"Your outrageous nervous energy suggests a different story."

Tim hadn't realized until that comment that he had been senselessly tapping the pillar again, not with the discarded batarang anymore, but with his gloved knuckles. Maybe Damien had a point in observing that his skittish behavior was a little off, but the over-confident ten year-old was known to approach delivering his statements in the most acrimonious-possible way.

Regardless, Tim was no more tolerant of his younger brother's acid quips than usual. "I'm just apprehensive about having to babysit you on patrol."

This got a rise out of Robin, whom was well known to be particularly sensitive toward comments pertaining to his age or height. "Things only get worse when _you're_ around, Drake!"

"Actually, everything was great before _you_ showed up."

Damien's cheeks turned an enraged rosy hue. "I'm the greatest thing that ever happened to this team, you unprestigious jackanape!"

"That's enough!"

The two bickering birds were stopped in their onslaughts by Bruce's begrudging exclamation. He was glaring over his shoulder at his proteges, cowl pulled down, hands paused while hovering over the keyboard. _"Both_ of you are acting like children. If you don't get it together, I won't allow _either_ of you to join me on patrol tonight. Understood?"

Equally deflated, but with Damien more indignant than the apologetic Tim, both solemnly nodded and fell into silence, allowing Bruce to turn back to his monitors and type furiously away. The bickering wasn't at all unusual, in a family comprised of radically dissimilar kids and an emotionally stunted surrogate parent, but that didn't make the recurring squabbles any less insufferable. They usually weren't as bad when Dick was there to mediate, but he and Jason took a rare night off from patrol to decompress—

Speaking of—Tim checked his phone, which he had been doing neurotically for the last hour. It was almost midnight and neither Dick, nor Jason had contacted him, or Bruce, or Damien as far as he knew. Granted, it wasn't unusual to not hear from Jason, but Dick was usually good about keeping in touch and even on nights with no plans to seek out trouble, the family liked to keep up with one another (that was, as long as everybody was on speaking terms, a phenomenon that was intermittent at best). After a couple hours of silence, Tim tried calling both his elder brothers himself, but both endeavors went straight to voicemail and it rubbed him the wrong way that he still hadn't received a return call. When he saw that, just like the last several times he checked, there were no new notifications, he sighed and put the device back away.

"Something the matter, Master Timothy?"

Red Robin whirled around, jolted out of his concerned reverie by the familiar British intonation.

"I guess I'm just a little worried about Dick and Jason," the teenager exhaled, cutting to the chase. "We haven't heard from either of them for hours."

"You don't suppose they could merely be distracted by their evening engagements?" Alfred countered, calmly as always, with his signature raise of one eyebrow.

Tim sighed. Maybe the butler was right; he was probably just being paranoid. Then again—

"I don't know. You're probably right, Alf. I guess it's just—there _has_ been some weird things going on lately—" Tim gestured to the monitors, still playing stories about the confounding disappearances and upsurges of mob activity—"And Dick is usually pretty good about keeping in touch—"

"Go look for them."

Both Tim's and Alfred's attentions were stolen and given immediately to Bruce, who hadn't bothered looking over his shoulder to deliver the statement. It was commanding and final, as all his declarations were.

Tim, taken aback as he hadn't even realized that Bruce was listening in the first place, stammered for clarification. "I—you want me to—"

"And Damien is going with you."

" _What?"_ The demon spawn whirled on his heel to his face his father, facial expression and stiffened body language indicating his outrage. Behind him, Tim was no more grateful. This was supposed to be a night of investigation and patrol, between the _three_ of them, overseeing various sections of the city, watching out for the regular crime patterns. Now two outrageously incompatible team members were receiving what they both perceived as the butt-end of Bruce's sudden change of plans.

"Don't argued with me," the Bat, unfazed, growled at Damien. He then swiveled in his chair to face Tim. "Keep in touch. Tell me if you find them. And let me know if there's trouble."

"But, father—"

"Go!"

Damien briefly recoiled, but his unflappable pride allowed him to recover quickly and march off toward his older brother with a harrumph, his small hands angrily balled into fists. He stomped past Tim without so much as a communicable acknowledgement, leaving the elder protégé to stalk after him, posture sunken with the same chafed attitude. From their positions near the monitors, Alfred and Bruce could hear their voices fading out, arguing which one of them was to be in charge.

Alfred turned to the Bat as soon as the juvenile argument faded out for good. "Change of plans, Master Bruce?" he queried.

"Tim is right to worry," Bruce said. Unbeknownst to any of his company, Bruce had checked his own cellular devices and was equally perturbed to see that no attempts at contact were established when he made it clear to Dick to check in with him regularly while him and Jason were supposed to be disengaged—vigilantes or not, there was no telling what kind of danger they could run to. And while Dick was somewhat indignant as always that Bruce liked to keep tabs on him (and Jason even more vitriolic of course), his first son reluctantly agreed. And somebody like Dick failing to fulfill such a simple responsibility was nothing to shake a stick at. It was, of course, absolutely possible that nothing serious was wrong—but Bruce was never one to take those sorts of risks. "It's not like Dick to not check in."

"Do you think they're in some sort of trouble, sir?"

Bruce hummed contemplatively, recognizing his father figure's tendency to play devil's advocate—especially with matters concerning his surrogate children. "I think it can't hurt to have Tim and Damien investigate," he explained, leaving the question up in the air. He was working on not assuming the worst.

"I shall hope for the best," Alfred said in earnest.

Bruce gave a quick nod and pulled his cowl over his head. Time for patrol.

* * *

Jason had never, ever been one for tactful approaches to sticky situations.

Granted, his methods for improvising were generally effective, at least he thought so; run in, guns a'blazing, and leave the retrospective judgment for the after-action review—much as Bruce vehemently disagreed. But he agreed at Dick's behest (after extensive negotiations and a little bit of yelling) to not carry a single firearm on their little recreational excursion, and resorting to melee was exponentially more difficult with only one working leg. As such, when some ugly thug that he didn't recognize from before came in and approached him and his brother, all he could do was bear his teeth and fall back on his incredibly eloquent curse words.

The mook, who had to be pushing seven feet in height and probably weighed four hundred pounds, went straight for the comatose Dick. Jason all but screamed at him; _"Get the hell away from him," "If you hurt him, you'll pay,"_ etc., but the bellicose declarations had little to no effect. The huge guy didn't so much as look at Jason as he undid Dick's restraints, let alone show any sign of intimidation.

Jason could only watch as Dick, limp as a rag doll, was thrown over the guy's shoulder and carried out of the room. He squirmed frantically in a restless attempt to magically wrestle himself out of the chains, but his efforts were no good. A white-and-red tinge of anger and frustration washed over him just as his brother was carried out of sight. God knew what they were going to do with him, and he was utterly defenseless.

Even if Jason made it out of there alive, Bruce would _kill_ him.

He wasn't sure how long it had been; could have been a few minutes or an hour, but eventually, the same huge thug came back into the small room where Jason now sat alone—except now, he carried in one hand a huge syringe, needle pointed up, thumb on the plunger—ready for use.

If Jason had been ferally flipping shit before, he went absolutely out of his mind at that point. He _hated_ needles. And he was sure that the amount of cursing and floundering conveyed that nicely.

Despite his protests, he was ultimately powerless to resist succumbing when the guy strong-armed him into submission and plunged whatever hellish drug was in the syringe right into Jason's bicep. Within seconds, the screaming vigilante was under, the redness of his anger quickly overwhelmed by the blackness of the sedative.

He struggled to get his eyes open. A white light immediately flooded his limited vision and overwhelmed his senses; a pang of soreness erupted behind his eyes and he flinched in an attempt to mitigate his exposure to the painful stimuli.

His consciousness returned to him a little more with every passing second and he was able to slowly peel his eyelids back, registering with brief confusion, the whiteness that surrounded him, the ceiling light directly overhead, the fact that he was lying down on some kind of smooth, stiff surface. The confusion translated almost immediately to alarm.

In a burst of instinctive reaction, Jason moved to jump up, but found out immediately that his attempts at escape were for naught—something was holding him down. With a frustrated grunt, the vigilante craned his neck to observe the source of his immobility and found that he was bound at his wrists and legs by leather restraints to some kind of cot…

His eyes were finally finished his adjusting and his head stopped swimming enough for him to look around with adequate lucidity to observe his surroundings—he was in what looked like a minimalistic med-bay, a whitewashed room with crude medical equipment, almost like a hospital room stripped down to the bare necessities. A heart monitor and IV pole were within his peripheral, but neither of them were in use.

A confused, unjulating sensation clouded his mind. Where was he? What was he doing there? He squeezed his eyes closed, shutting out the unfamiliar environment, and tried to recollect everything he could for some kind of explanation—

The alley. The thugs. Broken leg. Dick.

Dick!

Jason's eyes snapped open and he looked around again, but this time frantically in search of his brother; he remembered everything now, the visions emerging from the lingering fog of whatever sedative had been used to knock him out.

All of a sudden, a repetitive beeping came into his awareness, a sound with which he was all too familiar. When he looked toward the source of it, and his head stopped swimming so much, a brief, fleeting sense of relief washed over him; however, it was quickly weighed down by the intense gravity of the situation.

Dick lay there next to him a few feet away, resting listlessly on a cot identical to Jason's. He was hooked up to a heart monitor, his pale face free of expression as if he was merely asleep. Jason couldn't see the side of his face that had gotten struck, but judging by the way his broken leg was in a splint, the younger vigilante would hazard a guess that Dick's gash had been stitched up. Whoever kidnapped them was taking care of them.

"So you have finally awoken."

The young man's head snapped, wide-eyed, toward the direction of the voice, ready to bear his teeth at the perpetrator of his abduction despite his defenselessness. The presumed owner of the comment, a tall man clad in black, entered through a door behind Jason's cot and walked around to face the latter head on. Jay quirked an eyebrow as he got a good look at the stranger—or, conversely, a not-so-good look, as a solid, featureless black mask obscured his face.

"Who are you?" Jason growled, balling his hands into fists. "What is going on?"

The man stood stoically, seemingly unfazed by Jason's feral inflection, his hands entwined behind his erect back. He must have noticed Jason's eyes flicking over to his older brother as he lay catatonic, for after a moment's pause, he spoke in his calm, smooth voice: "You and Richard Grayson are safe."

Jason started, taken aback. This yahoo knew Dick's full name? "What-? How do you know-?"

"All your questions will be answered in time, Mr. Todd. We only want to extend our earnest feelings of solidarity—"

"Solidarity?" Jason spat, pulling again at his wrist restraints. "Are you shitting me? Your cronies bashed in Dick's head, broke my leg, tossed us into a van, then knocked me out and tied me to a table, and you're hoping I'll be accepting of your fucked-up version of 'solidarity'?"

"There is much that you fail to understand," the stranger said, as stoically as ever, which only mounted Jason's infuriation. "Our methods may have been more…extreme, than intended, but we only act in a state of urgency."

"I don't give a damn what your cult is or. Let me and Dick out of here and I promise that I'll go easy on you when I come back to beat your asses."

Jason knew it was fruitless endeavor, but only stewed more in anger when the masked man simply shook his head, as if in condescending sanction of a disobedient child. "I suspected as much from you, Jason. You're a stubborn and volatile individual. I had hoped you would set aside such idiosyncrasies in favor of easier cooperation for the betterment of Gotham—for the world, really. But as I said, there is much you fail to understand."

Jason didn't respond immediately, confounded by the strange commentary. "What—who _are_ you? How do you know who I—"

"We know much about you—" Jason's brow quirked at that, at the _"we,"_ but he didn't interrupt—"we've been keeping tabs on your family for a long time. We know your secret identities. Red Hood. Nightwing. Batman, and so forth."

Jason stared, wide-eyed, an unfamiliar feeling of fright and foreboding superseding the feelings of raw anger that he had been hitherto registering. This black-masked freak, whoever the hell it was, and whoever constituted that plural pronoun in this last statement, had tabs on his entire family's secret identities—something they could easily use as leverage for whatever composed their mysterious agenda. Certain things weren't adding up, though—Jason couldn't conceive of how this information could have possibly been obtained, for one thing. And for another, what motive could they possibly have for maintaining these secrets for whatever duration they've been kept? How long have they been watching Batman and his cohorts? Why, if they knew who these vigilantes truly were, have they opted out of conceding that revelation to their enemies?

"We have no intention of taking undue advantage of this valuable information," the masked figure continued, as if in response to Jason's unsettling thoughts. "That is, if your cohort so chooses to cooperate."

Jason's eyes fell back onto his cohort, then travelled to the heart monitor, observing how the jags peaked slowly, but steadily. "Dick? Cooperate with _what_?"

"That shall be revealed in time," the stranger repeated. Without further ado, he turned as if to walk away.

"So what?" Jason snarled, glaring daggers at the mask, "You're just going to keep us tied up until you have your way with us? What makes you think we'll go along with whatever you have planned?"

"Once all is revealed, you will see that justice is on our side. And if you fail to realize this, then more extreme measures will simply have to be taken. But such is the struggle on the quest for righteousness."

"You sound like one of those zealous priests," Jason said, unnecessarily, throwing a smirk his captor's way. "So are you just going to walk away? Not even gonna tell me how to refer to your majesty?"

The mask inevitably obscured the stranger's features, but Jason thought he could tell by his stiffened body language that his face brooded at the cold sarcasm. "You will learn my name, only when we have established more trust."

"Hardly seems fair."

"Such is life," the figure said with a shrug, almost seeming like he was attempting to emulate Jason's facetiously cavalier attitude.

"What about Dick?"

"Don't worry about your brother. He's safe."

"Define ' _safe._ '"

The stranger turned back to Jason, resuming his former stance with his hands behind his back, the black mask staring at him dead-on. "If we wanted to bring further harm to you, we would have by now. The injuries you have sustained were unfortunate collateral on account of the impressive resistance you showed our mercenaries."

Jason looked forward at his leg nestled in the splint, and, judging by the tolerable dullness of the pain, he was likely being medicated. Or maybe it was the last lingering effects of the sedative. Whoever these guys were genuinely wanted to keep them in some kind of working order. "Mercenaries? You hired common street thugs to do your dirty work?"

"A matter of identification preservation."

"Trying to be sneaky, huh? Using dim-witted mobsters to blend into Gotham's commoners?"

"You're a sharp young man, Mr. Todd," the stranger said, turning toward the door and this time beating his exit, as if he feared that he revealed too much and didn't want to stick around at the risk of telling his captive more. "Just as I remembered."

The door closed behind him just as that last comment echoed out. Jason glared after him for a moment, putting aside the open-ended confoundment of the strange remark before turning back to his restraints. He would try to figure that one out later. Right now, he had himself and his comatose sibling to break out of this freak show.

"This is all your fault," Jason found himself murmuring, aiming the comment at Dick, despite knowing full well that there was no way he could hear. " _Let's cut through this alley,_ you said. _It's a shortcut,_ you said. Good going, dickhead."

"Stop…yelling…"

The younger man snapped his eyes immediately toward that voice, wide-eyed as he observed Dick stirring, struggling to get his eyes open. Jason took in his appearance, trying to get a read on his condition by what he could reasonably observe from his restrained position on the adjacent cot. Dick's face was still ghostly pale, and as he tried to wake up, his breathing was becoming somewhat jagged. A few beads of sweat ran down his temple, making Jason concerned that a fever could be on the rise. If their captors did a poor job at treating his head trauma—which Jason was under the impression was not unlikely—any number of consequences could complicate things further.

"Dick?"

"Unn—" Dick forced his eyes open, blinking rapidly at the overwhelming intake of light. "B-Bruce…?"

"No. It's Jason."

"…Little Wing…?"

Jason couldn't fight back the smile at the nickname he had always shirked, but he would be remiss to deny the great relief he felt that Dick recognized him, not amnesiac as Jason had feared. "Yes. Just take it easy, alright, Dickiebird? I'm gonna break us out of here."

Dick didn't show cognizance of what Jason had said, only humming something incoherent and letting his head loll to the side, unable to fight off the urge to sleep off his relentless headache. Jason didn't bother encouraging him to remain conscious this time, instead focusing his energies on getting his wheels turning, intensively endeavoring to figure out an escape. His leather jacket had been confiscated and was nowhere in sight, leaving his cell phone safely out of the equation, and Jason was guessing that Dick's phone had been disposed of as well. Not to mention that the restraints fastening him to the cot would have made use of a phone exceedingly difficult anyway.

 _Think, Todd. What would Batman do?_

Jason kicked himself for having that thought. It was a bit of saccharine dogma that hadn't been on his mind for a long time, maybe once or twice since he had been reanimated. His jaw muscles worked as he attempted to get his thoughts back on track; pocket the angst for later, he coached himself, focus on getting out.

A huge crash jolted Jason out of his thoughts. A series of thuds followed it, sounding like they were coming from the corridor outside the room. He tried to crane his neck to see the door, only managing to get a glimpse of it over his shoulder, but that was unhelpful. He could only strain his hearing to register the recurring sonorous phenomena, crashes and thuds and the occasional male voice shouting something unintelligible. It sounded like a fight. And it sounded like it was getting closer.

Jason's eyes flashed back over to his brother's prone form. Neither of them were in any condition to deal with whatever hostile entity was making their way closer to them, let alone the fact that both of them were tied down.

"This night just keeps getting better and better," Jason sighed, eyes furrowed, bracing himself for what was coming. In the back of his head, he accepted the fact that he was freeing himself or Dick any time soon, certainly not in time to be onslaughted by the oncoming commotion, edging ever closer to their prison.

Jason braced himself, residual anger flooding over him. He _hated_ feeling helpless. He hated that those thugs in the alley managed to get the better of him. He hated whatever low-life felt the need to capture and restrain them—he would be sure to get his hands around their necks as soon as he was out of this mess.

He tensed; the noises outside stopped for a moment. A lingering silence fell over the atmosphere for a few precious seconds.

 _Bang!_

Whoever they were, they were trying to break through the door. Apparently they didn't have a key.

 _Bang!_

Jason tensed more. Damn these restraints. How he would love to take out his frustrations on some fresh-faced perpetrators.

 _BANG!_

The door swung open with such force that it hit the wall opposite, emitting a subsequent crash. Jason, unable to catch a glimpse of the mysterious adversaries, could only anticipate.

What would Batman do?


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: Thank you so much to my wonderful reviewers. Hearing from you guys really is a big help. Sorry about the gap in uploads (school), but on we go...thank you for being patient and loyal!**

* * *

 _"Are you sure it's a good idea to go out totally unarmed tonight?"_

 _"You were the one who made the suggestion in the first place."_

 _Tim fidgeted uncomfortably, looking downward at some unhelpful abstraction. Dick stood before him with his hands cavalierly tucked in his pockets, a small incredulous smile teasing at Tim's sudden display of hesitance at the idea of his two eldest brothers taking a night off from patrol. Jason had gotten increasingly tangled in his involvement with the Outlaws, Dick was finding himself in Gotham more often than not in the past couple of months, and the more the entire Bat family involved themselves in the turbulence of the city, the more the flames of their brotherly rivalry rekindled. The second-youngest, expressing a sudden interest in familial psychopathy, almost teasingly suggested that Red Hood and Nightwing relinquish their secret identities for all of one night to explore their unspoken estrangement._

 _Always one for reconciliation, Dick thought the idea wasn't a bad one. Hoping that his eldest would be a good influence, even Bruce offered some encouragement, and of course Alfred had to offer his couple cents worth of affirmation. Although sad to lose Dick as a crime fighting ally for a night, Tim wasn't too upset about the fruition of such a concept...much as he wasn't a fan of Jason._

 _That was, until the last second. He approached Dick shortly after dinner to talk to him in private, and, to the latter's surprise, expressed reservations._

 _"I know," Tim said with a sigh, in response to Dick's lighthearted protest. "I guess I'm just—maybe I'm just anxious about having to deal with Damien all by myself."_

 _"He's not the bad after you crack through that pedigreed exterior." Dick placed a hand on Tim's shoulder. "It's just for one night," he said smilingly, but in short order that smile mysteriously melted into a look of intuitive inquiry. "Are you sure you're telling me everything, Tim? Is there anything on your mind?"_

 _Tim looked back up at Dick, brow furrowed, thinking in earnest about the question, but unable to articulate. In the back of his mind, he thought that perhaps the recent mysterious disappearances of acrobats was gnawing at his subconscious, but Dick wasn't a performing acrobat and didn't fit in the age group besides, making him an unlikely candidate. Still, he couldn't help but have some kind of strange red flag waving behind his eyes, distant and indecipherable. He knew he couldn't express it without sounding nonsensical. "No, it's nothing," he said uneasily, trying to sound firm. "I'm sure you guys will be fine. Just—ya know, stay in touch."_

 _Dick's good-natured smile returned. "Hey, I'm the older brother," Dick said, "It's_ my _job to be protective."_

 _Tim tellingly didn't return the smile, causing Dick to sober as he registered the unfounded seriousness of Tim' s request. "Don't worry, I promise I'll text you every couple of hours. Okay,_ mom?"

 _This time, Tim forced a disingenuous smile and a small, silent nod._

 _Dick, grinning warmly, gave his younger brother a pat on the shoulder and retreated shortly thereafter. Tim watched after him, trying to ignore that foreboding feeling that he couldn't quite identify._

 _They'll be fine, he told himself._

"Drake! Come in! Are you on the link or not?"

Tim snapped out of his thoughts with a start, abruptly realizing that Bat-Brat was yelling at him over the radio. Tapping the speaker in his ear, Tim begrudgingly responded; "Yes, I'm here. What is it?"

 _"I asked twice now if you've seen anything yet. Why aren't you responding?"_

Tim scanned the cityscape below him from the rooftop ledge on which he was kneeling. Sirens wailed in the distance, cars drove by below, young people walked two and fro arm-in-arm, litter fluttered about in the nighttime breeze. Nothing unusual.

"No, I haven't," Tim answered, ignoring Damien's second question.

The youngest seemed to be okay with dropping it, although the pompous irritation was still conspicuous in his inflection. _"I'm guessing you've failed to establish contact with them?"_

Tim hopelessly checked his cell phone in automatic response to the question, unsurprised to find no notifications of the sort he was hoping for. Of course, his own efforts to call both Dick and Jason went straight to voice mail—all five times each. "That would be correct, unfortunately."

 _"My own efforts have yielded similar results."_

"Even if they _were_ just not responding because of the movie, it would have been over at least an hour ago," Tim muttered into the link, although it was more to himself than to Damien. "I don't believe they just forgot or both their phones happened to die early in the night. Dick said he would—"

 _"We should report back to Batman. We've combed this entire corner of the city and have found no leads. I'm moving toward your location."_

Tim didn't respond immediately, only sighing in resignation. Hardly a minute later, he could feel Robin's presence as the younger crimefighter swung onto the rooftop from which Tim had been keeping watch of the streets below. They both thoroughly investigated the area within five square miles of the movie theater Jason and Dick were supposed attend and neither had found anything unusual. Red Robin wracked the investigative part of his brain for any kind of idea—but the thought of locating their brothers with no leads whatsoever was simply not feasible—

Tim paused suddenly when, staring blankly into the alley below, something caught his eye.

Meanwhile, Robin had been approaching from behind. "Well? Are we going to go, or are you going to just stand—"

Red Robin held up a hand, silencing his company. "Hang on, Robin," he said, squinting toward the ground forty feet below. Without another word, he was descending the fire escapes in huge leaps, making his way rapidly toward the asphalt of the empty alleyway. Begrudgingly startled at his partner's inability to communicate, Robin soon descended after him.

"What is it?" the younger vigilante demanded, his voice echoing off the walls of the abandoned alley. The sounds of pipe drainage dripping onto the pavement bounced off the damp bricks, creating the acoustic phenomenon of a huge, ancient cave.

Red Robin, unresponsive, only walked over to a particular spot and squatted down, momentarily examining an object that was obscured to Damien as his brother's back was to him. He approached Red Robin incredulously, not needing to repeat his query as the older detective stood up suddenly and turned to face him, a glinting object clutched in his fist.

Damien looked closer at it, then shot an uncomprehending look at his partner. The object was a watch. The glass protecting the face was cracked. "A watch?"

"This is Dick's."

Damien's nose twitched and he examined the small metal object closer. "How can you be sure? It's a generic time piece. Anybody could have dropped it."

"No." Tim turned the watch over to display the backing, on which _Wayne Enterprises_ was etched in tiny lettering. "This is custom. Bruce gave it to Dick last Christmas. No other watch like this one is made by Wayne Tech. And what's more, it's in perfect condition aside from the crack. It hasn't been laying here long."

Robin looked into his compatriot's domino mask, now convinced. "So we know they were here. That still doesn't give us much of a lead."

"There was a scuffle here," Tim responded firmly, looking headlong toward the back end of the alley, seemingly fixated on some incriminating evidence to support his claim. Damien followed his gaze, squinting intently in the dim lighting to find whatever was so distinguishing about the musty pavement.

"How can you tell?"

"Look at this." Red Robin walked over to an abandoned crowbar and harvested it, almost obscured by a pile of trash up against one of the buildings, looking it over solemnly himself before handing it over to Robin.

The latter only needed a brief moment to locate the source of Red's fixation. The hooked end of the crowbar was colored with a line of crimson—blood. And on the ground not far from where Red Robin had retrieved it, were sparse spots of the same scarlet, almost impossible to distinguish amongst the dampened asphalt and dark light. When Robin observed it, even he surprisingly didn't conceal his affected impression.

"Good eye."

Tim didn't respond. He only looked at the watch as it was clutched in his fist, held as if it were for dear life. A solemn, yet analytic look was evident behind the white lenses of his mask. "I _knew_ something was wrong."

"What?"

"Nothing." Tim shook it off and tucked the watch into his belt, looking at Robin with hardened resolve. "That blood is fresh, so whatever fight took place didn't happen too long ago. The perpetrators may not have gotten far. We need to find them fast."

Robin's arms were crossed, his face pulled into a tight look of contemplation with a hint of resentment. "Undoubtedly. And how do you propose we go about that?"

Red Robin retreated a few steps, looking around intently at the environment, wracking his intuitive detective training, knolling one—two—three times…there had to be _something_. They found Dick's watch, which must have been dropped in the midst of some kind of struggle, since Tim hardly knew watches to undetectably slip off with enough force to crack glass of the hardy material that only Wayne Tech would use. Blood on a blunt object and the ground, to add insult to injury. They couldn't let this trail go cold.

The older vigilante, a thought coming through from the back of his mind, looked up past the alleyway, through the perpendicular buildings toward the traffic light at a small intersection several yards away.

Suddenly, Red Robin's face lit up. It looked to Damien as if a lightbulb had gone off over his head.

The light had a traffic cam.

A smile pulled at Tim's hitherto stoic expression. "Bingo."

* * *

Batman's attention was utterly fixated. He had his eyes on suspicious activity of a group of young male perpetrators inciting what appeared to be gang activity in one of the forsaken alleys in Gotham's west corner. He was watching the activity carefully from a few rooftops away, a pair of high-tech binoculars enhancing the display. He was waiting for the right moment to intervene—

 _"Batman, come in!"_

It was Red Robin's voice. The Bat immediately lowered the binoculars and activated his link. "Go."

 _"D and J appear to have been involved in a struggle. I'm guessing they were abducted. There's a traffic camera nearby; we need to hack it for more information."_

Batman's face fell, almost imperceptibly, but quickly thereafter hardened with the return of his characteristic stoicism. "Stay put; I'm on my way to your location. Be ready for pick-up in three minutes. Batman out."

The Dark Knight turned to descend the fire escapes in leaps and bounds, summoning the Batmobile on the way. The drug bust would have wait until another night; his starting the vehicle and driving to retrieve his proteges was almost robotic, until a familiar British brogue pulled him out of his deep concentration.

 _"Master Bruce,"_ Alfred's voice piped through over the Batmobile's comm. link, _"I've got somebody on the line to the manor wanting to have a word with you—"_

"Not now, Alfred." The last thing he needed was some broker or a lobbyist wanting to contact him about Wayne Enterprise stocks.

 _"He says it's urgent, sir."_

"Who is it?"

 _"A Mr. Clark Kent, sir."_

"Clark," Batman repeated quietly to himself, now intrigued—and somewhat apprehensive. Superman rarely reached out to Bruce unless it was because there was some kind of problem, or unless it was in conjunction with Justice League business, neither of which the Dark Knight was particularly wanting to deal with right now—not while he's already got one urgent problem under his utility belt. But why would be contact the manor and not the Cave, or Batman's personal comm.? "Can it wait until I get back to the Cave?" he inquired, seeing Robin and Red Robin in sight as the car approached their location. "It won't be long."

 _"I'll put him on hold, sir."_

With that, Alfred's voice was offline and Tim and Damien were climbing into the vehicle, unsurprisingly arguing about something Batman didn't care to weigh in on.

"Where's the traffic camera?" Bruce demanded as he drove off with his wayward children, cutting into their incessant bickering.

Red Robin piped up before Damien could—"On the corner of Fifth and South Street," he said, "On the light in front of that big office building."

"What makes you think a vehicle containing two forcedly abducted victims would have a license plate?" Damien demanded, arms crossed and lower lip pouting out, looking admonishingly at his adoptive sibling.

"We won't know until we actually _look_ at it, will we?" Tim retorted.

"I have serious doubts."

"I didn't see _you_ coming up with any decent leads, Watson. Besides, even if we can't track the car, we'll get a look at the kidnappers."

"Masks."

"What makes you so sure they're wearing masks? Or that their identities are indecipherable otherwise?" Red Robin demanded, gradually more assured that Damien only countered every possible angle out of contempt that it hadn't been _him_ to garner the useful clues.

"It would be far too easy if anything else were the case."

"Doesn't matter. We have to be thorough."

"We should have stayed and investigated longer."

"That's time we're wasting while god-knows-what is happening to Dick and Jason."

"Hacking into a low-quality traffic camera in hopes of catching a pixelated glimpse of some disguised hoodlums driving an indistinguishable vehicle could be wasting even more time!"

"Quiet!" Bruce's booming voice silenced the two adolescents. "Tim is right, Damien," he continued, glancing at his charges in the rear-view mirror. "We need to quickly consider every possible angle, and something as incriminating as a video recording can't be ignored, regardless of assumptions about its viability."

Tim smirked at Damien, who turned defiantly to look out the window with a "harrumph."

* * *

Damien had been right about a few things—the van had no license plate, and the video was indistinguishably pixelated—but he had been wrong about the perpetrators; they weren't, in fact, wearing masks. But with playback of such low quality, a rate of eight frames per second, an enhancement of the footage didn't present any recognizable likenesses that would offer the team a lead right off the bat.

If anything, the traffic footage confirmed Tim's summation of the situation; two adult male figures—one at least six feet tall and the other a few inches shorter—made their way into the alley at about nine-thirty, were cornered by eight perpetrators, and beaten after a drawn-out scuffle, taken away in the unidentifiable vehicle. There was no doubt in anybody's mind that the two victimized men were Dick and Jason; even the low-quality video registered Jason's signature leather jacket and white tuft of hair...and, even more assuredly, Wayne Tech's facial recognizability was able to pull Jason and Dick up in the data base.

Bruce tried running the faces of the attackers through a data base likewise in hopes of finding a match—but they weren't in the FBI's system, or the GCPD's. In addition, they ran finger prints on the crowbar, which Tim had recovered and brought with them back to the Cave—but again, there were no matches, meaning either that the person who wielded it had no former criminal record, or otherwise dodged being a part of any database—both seeming unlikely. Batman grunted wordlessly as all this came to light, disguising no small amount of frustration and incredulity.

Damien stood before the monitor with the footage and data displayed, arms crossed and brow narrowed darkly behind his domino mask. "Why aren't we getting any results?"

"I'm not sure."

"Now what?"

All the while, Tim had been pacing intensely back and forth behind them. "There's got to be something," he said, with a touch of desperation, cupping his chin. This amount of caffeinated intensity was not unusual for him. "We must be missing something. There's no way we can let this lead go cold."

"The van is indistinguishable, just as I hypothesized," Robin deadpanned. "There must be a hundred others just like it all over Gotham."

Tim stopped cold in his tracks. "Wait a minute," he said, approaching the monitor and squinting intensively at the display as if to burn a hole through it. "Batman, zoom in on the side of the van and enhance the footage."

Bruce did as Tim said, while Damien cut in with some predictable skepticism about how useless such an action would be.

"Now turn up the contrast and invert the colors," Tim instructed, ignoring his younger companion.

When Batman completed those actions, the image now almost unrecognizably edited, the section of the van that had been emphasized showed a faint but newly-visible marking that had been hitherto undecipherable. It looked like to be writing, but the quality was too low to make out the actual words.

"Ah-hah!" Tim smilingly cried. "I knew it. If these goons aren't in the system, there was no way they could have purchased the van legally. They found an old rusty one and restored it; that image was painted over, but with one sloppy coating—just enough to get by. A few enhancements, and it still just barely comes through."

"That's a logo," Batman said, squinting analytically at it. "I recognize it. 'Smith Furnishings.' That van belonged to a warehouse south of here that went out of business at least a decade ago."

Damien looked quizzically at his mentor. "So we find the address and go to that location, hoping that the thugs who got the vehicle working kept it close to home base?"

"It's a start," Batman replied. "I know where that warehouse is. It's been abandoned for a long time—not an unlikely choice for a criminal hideout."

"What are we waiting for?" Tim demanded; "Let's go!"

"Master Bruce."

The Bat turned as Alfred approached, making his way to the platform from the entrance to the cave. "Before you go," the butler said, "you still have Mr. Kent on the line."

"Damnit," Batman murmured, having honestly forgotten all about Clark. He hardly wanted to put off pursuing his newest brunt to bear. "Tell him I'm busy, Alfred."

"He seemed rather excitable on the phone, Master Bruce," Alfred insisted calmly, wearing the sort of placid expression that Bruce knew to mean he was out of options. "It seems to be a matter of utmost urgency."

Bruce sighed deeply and turned to Tim and Damien. "You two grab a motor bike and drive to the warehouse. I'll send you the address over the comm. I'll be right behind you."

Tim hesitated, perturbed that Batman would be separating from them, even for a short time. "But, Batman—"

"We don't have time to waste," Bruce interrupted, his voice intense, laced with a sense of emergency. "You and Robin can handle yourselves for a short while. I'll catch up to you. Now go."

Reluctantly, the two proteges obeyed, but not without quietly bickering as they exited.

Bruce turned back to the control panel, Alfred looking over his shoulder. With the press of a button, Clark's spectacled visage was displayed on the big screen, his expression laced with tell-tale somberness and worry. Immediately, Batman was intrigued by how his superpowered compatriot hadn't contacted him in his uniform, indicating an unfamiliar air of informality—meaning this probably _wasn't_ about the Justice League, after all.

"What's—"

"We've got to talk, Bruce."

"What is it, Clark?" Batman asked, trying not to sound as rushed as he felt.

Miraculously, the frown playing at Clark's face deepened, as if he was woe to share whatever burden was plaguing him. Batman was usually prepared for anything, but even he was taken aback when his friend and colleague, with conspicuous hesitance, uttered his next statement.

"It's about Dick."

* * *

 **A/N: Sorry that there wasn't too much Dick and Jay in this chapter...but don't worry, they'll be plenty of them in the next installment. Thanks for reading!**


	4. Chapter 4

**Somebody pointed out that I've been spelling "Damian's" name wrong. I'll make an honest effort, but I can't promise I won't eff it up sometimes from here on out. That spelling just looks weird to me.**

 **Also, don't be looking for immaculate medical accuracy in this story. People display unusual feats of healing all the time in action-oriented fiction. No, Dick's not going to escape his concussion entirely unaffected (at least at first), but I'm just warning you that I'm not a doctor and there will, in all likelihood, a display of creative license.**

 **Anyway, many thanks as usual to my reviewers. It means a lot to me.**

* * *

Dick stirred. A groaned escaped his lips, one that felt so distant and detached to his inhibited auditory senses that he couldn't recognize it as his own.

He was only a fourth of the way awake. His eyelids fluttered, glimpses of sonorous vocalizations leaking through longer periods of mute silence, more than likely brought on by the splitting head ache. The longer his senses betrayed him, the more vehemently he wished to succumb to darkness, but there was no way he could sleep when he was in so much _pain_. He attempted to raise a shaking hand to massage his head—to perhaps locate the source of the migraine—but he soon thereafter realized that he was inhibited.

 _Dick_.

Did someone say his name?

 _Dick. Are you with us?_

There were hands on him and he felt himself suddenly defying gravity. The sudden motion created an unsettling sensation all over his body—his limbs went numb, and the blood rushed from his head with such rapidity that pain in his temple was increased tenfold, throbbing in sync with his heartbeat. He couldn't bring his eye to open completely and stay open—they only fluttered—but regardless of what was happening, he only knew one thing—

A brief spasm and a gagging noise was indication enough for his captors to allow him to keel over and retch. The violence of the sickening purge somehow calmed the harassment of his hypersensitive sensory intake and he was able to make out those muffled words, was able to better assess the locations of his quivering appendages.

"He's got a fever," someone said, a youthful, inquisitive inflection. He knew the voice, but couldn't place a name.

He was hauled back to his feet. Other dialogue was going on, but his mind hadn't sufficiently cleared in order that he might follow it intelligently. The remarks came in waves of comprehensibility, fading in and out like passing sirens.

"Can you walk at all?"

"Where's B—"

"It's a—"

"We're trying—"

"We have to hurry."

In the recesses of his concussed noggin, Dick finally registered that he should be attempting to walk—the hands that were on him (he couldn't tell exactly how many of them there were) were struggling to maintain their grip while also maintaining a biped position. A visceral sense of urgency washed over him, and his instinct insisted that, for some reason, time was of the essence.

With a groan of effort, Dick tried to square up—but the slight tensing of his muscles when he did so sent a jolt of pain zapping through his skull, like somebody had stabbed his temple with an ice pick.

"Dick?"

He heard his name and tried to look in the direction of its source, blinking his eyes open. The world was hazy and far, _far_ too bright.

Words were spoken, but only a fraction of them were audible. "Try to—out—fast—"

Dick groaned in response, finally realizing that he was only upright because his arm was slung around a human figure, and almost a hundred percent of his weight was thrown up against whosoever it was.

Dick couldn't bring his vocal chords to function, but he murmured something in response and put one foot in front of the other, attempting to remove some of the burden from his unidentified compatriot, blindly trusting him to guide him in the right direction. Two blurs—one big and one small—were advancing at a more admirable pace in front of them.

The acrobat could feel consciousness slipping away from him. He could feel an exodus of the sensation of gravity, could feel the perception of mobility exit his legs.

Next to him, his compatriot grunted with the shift in weight. "Stay awake," he pleaded, but he seemed to know it was hopeless. His head snapped toward some other human-like abstraction—one of the blurs ahead of them. "Robin, he's getting worse."

The advent of consciousness was in and out, leaving sporadic patches of time missing in Dick's perception, making his registration of reality spotty and nonsensical. Red's muscles tensed under his weight as he attempted to shoulder the burden, increasing gradually as his eldest sibling failed to resist the pull of passing out.

He wasn't sure how much time had passed, but the last thing Dick remembered was a series of crashes, an auditory kerfuffle that threatened to overload his hearing, and then the sensation of buckling under Tim's grasp being replaced by a quick, overwhelming feeling of elevation. His feet were off the floor. A mass of black was in front of him, the peculiar sensation of fabric pressed up against his skin, a vice-like grip holding him immovably to the solid surface that ensnared him.

After that, he slumped into the beckoning blackness.

* * *

The third crash sent the door hyper-extending on its hinges and flying into the wall, causing Jason to cringe at the dust and acoustic phenomena that were obstructing his immediate perception of the brand-new intruders. Still as immobilized as ever, and increasingly enraged about it, he could only ball up his fists and bear his teeth like a feral dog, impatiently waiting to intimidate the newcomers to the fullest extent of his ability.

" _Told you_ they'd be in here."

It was the so far first and only time that Jason heard _that_ voice and consequently relaxed. Had he been told yesterday that Damian's pitchy gloating were to bring him any amount of consolation, he would have raucously guffawed.

Accordingly, both Red Robin and Robin ran into Jason's line of vision and the latter followed them intently with his eyes, even allowing a small smile to play at his lips. "It's about damn time you showed up," he exclaimed as Robin attended to his restraints and Red Robin to Dick's. The ambient beeping in the room flatlined as the second-youngest detective disconnected the heart monitor.

"Unfortunately, my inferior charge retarded the process of discovering you," Damian deadpanned, muttering it so quietly that it seemed more like he was venting more to himself than to anyone else.

As the last of the leather restraints were undone and Jason was able to sit upright, he looked immediately to his eldest crimefighting cohort, who, while now unrestrained, was unconscious and being scrupulously examined by Red Robin's meticulous hands.

"That's one heck of a contact point," Red murmured as he looked over the perpetually worsening bruise on Dick's temple where the crowbar connected. He took note of a clammy film of perspiration germinating on the elder's brow and pressed the back of his hand to Dick's forehead. "Feels like he's got a fever." He then turned to his other two cohorts an addressed Jason; "Has he been awake at all since getting knocked out?"

"Yeah, a couple times," Jason said. "But he wasn't exactly 'all there,' if you catch my drift."

"I imagine," Tim said, turning back to Dick. "We don't have time to get him on a stretcher. We'll have to transport him as quickly and as carefully as possible. Any slight movement could exacerbate the possibility of brain damage. Help me with him, Robin."

Damian flew to Red Robin's assistance in painstakingly adjusting Dick's limp form and edging him away from the cot, using their duality to balance his prone body so as to not jostle anything above his shoulders.

As they adjusted the eldest vigilante's position, carefully lowering him from the cot, the hitherto comatose Dick seemed to ignite with sickly vigor, letting out a sound that seemed to be half-cough and half-gag. His body lurched, and Red Robin instinctively lowered him to his knees with enough gentleness to allow the necessary rapidity. Once on his hands and knees, Tim still keeping a grip on him, he wretched violently onto the floor.

Tim's and-admittedly-Damian's faces registered intense concern from behind his mask. Just another symptom of head trauma.

Jason attempted to get to his feet, but hissed in pain when the pressure on his bad leg sent a jolt through to his entire femur.

Red Robin's eyes flew over to Jason, landing immediately on the splinted appendage. "Can you walk at all?"

"It's a gamble," Jason responded through his teeth, still waiting for the pain to disseminate.

"Help Jason," Red Robin directed, nodding toward the older vigilante. "I can take Dick from here."

Robin scowled, perhaps as a result of both being ordered around by his predecessor and no less being directed to leave the side of the only sibling-esque figure he ever tolerated, but he reluctantly obeyed nonetheless, guiding Jason's arm over his shoulders. The latter was woe to accept any help from the Bat Brat, but even he, through his fierce spirit of independence, knew better than to compromise their escape by proposing an argument.

"Where's Batman?" Jason asked, the absence suddenly occurring to him.

"He's on his way…supposedly. In the meantime we have to do everything we can to get out of here on our own."

The gang edged toward the exit, but their collective attention was gripped by a sudden series of loud thuds.

"The hell is that?" Jason demanded.

"Our new friends," Red Robin responded, nodding toward the corridor. A door just outside the exit was producing the thuds, as if someone were striking it with an anvil.

"You just locked them in there?"

"We knocked them out and tied them up," Robin said, almost defensively. "Our mission was a search and rescue, not a crime bust."

Red Robin cut in; "Let's just hurry. We're parked right outside. We don't have time to take on any more of these mooks."

They advanced into the corridor and worked their way down, the sound of the thuds and the sonorous voices of enraged thugs fading as they gained distance, but it was slower going than any of them were used to; Red Robin had a difficult time dragging Dick along while being gentle enough to not cause any additional damage, and Jason was seldom less encumbered by his fractured leg. Damian, half Jason's height, was hardly any help.

"Hnng…"

Red Robin looked sidelong at Dick's head, which was rising slightly as he seemed to stir.

Tim's eyes went wide as he watched his brother claw his way back to the waking world, surprised that he was sliding in and out of consciousness at all. "Dick?"

The acrobat's eyes were squinted and his face was screwed up as if he just stepped out into the direct rays in the sun after sleeping in a dark cave for years. "Ughh…what's…what—"

Jason looked over his shoulder at the spectacle. "Is he going to be alright?" he asked, registering concern at the drawn, sheet-white complexion that the ordinarily caramel-toned vigilante took on.

Meanwhile, the thuds continued in the background.

"We're trying to get out of here fast," Tim said to Dick without attempting to mitigate his profound sense of urgency. "Do you think you can help me out?"

"Unf…" was all Dick could force out of his larynx, but he seemed to at least vaguely understand Tim's indication and attempted to take some the burden off the latter, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other.

The four managed to make it to the end of the corridor, but they all had to stop dead in their tracks at the abrupt sound of a huge crash down at the other end. Dick let out a low sound of pain when the sound exacerbated the jolting pain in his skull and he slumped downward.

"Stay awake," Red beseeched. "Robin, he's getting worse."

"Jesus," Jason breathed, knowing the bad news before he even turned all the way around.

Three large men, standing braced at the end of the hallway, emerged from a cloud of dust from the hard wall that went flying when they busted through the welded door and took off some structural chunks with it. Their eyes met with their quarries, all bearing big ugly teeth in raw contempt for the attempt at escape.

"You're not going anywhere," one of them growled, reaching to his belt and pulling out what appeared to be a taser. "One wrong move, and—"

He hadn't a chance to finish before Robin withdrew a smoke pellet and clouded the atmosphere with a burst of fog. The thug with the taser roared with surprised, but before he was able to make anything out beyond the smoke, his prey had run around the corner and was nowhere in sight. With a growl, he and his teammates ran after them.

They rounded the corner, and the four bat brothers were out of luck. Three more big evil-looking guys, these ones looking identically thug-like, came around the corner opposite. Their quarries were trapped in the middle of the hallway, with no place to hide, no suspensions on which a grapple could be of assistance, and two incapacitated captives that made it exponentially more difficult to put up a fight.

"This was a wonderful idea, feather brains," Damian muttered as Tim, ignoring him, looked wide-eyed at the two advancing aggregates, wracking his brain for a last-minute plan.

"Let's do this the easy way," one of the thugs stated, advancing slowly and menacingly with his trusty taser in tow. "No wrong moves and nobody has to get hurt."

Red Robin braced and clutched onto Dick, who could only look bleary-eyed and confused at the events unfolding before him. Meanwhile, both Jason and Damian glared daggers, hoping at the very least to kill off their pursuers with their intimidating facial expressions.

They were cornered. Trapped.

Both Tim and Damian attempted to reach for their batarangs, although conscious that, as they were under the threat of being electrocuted at a questionable movement, weren't in much of a position to do so.

It turned out, however, that they didn't need it. The taser-wielding thug took a metallic clang to the head and went down without so much as an "ow." The collective group turned toward the source of the strike and within the next minute, two more of them were out like lights at the mercy of the same air-born metallic object.

Among the unconscious bodies now slumped on the floor with burgeoning concussions, emerged Batman, batarang in hand.

The next series of actions happened in a blur of rapid-fire movement. The three thugs on the other end of the hallway advanced on the attack, but were retarded in their progress by Robin, who leaned Jason up against the wall to regain enough mobility so that he may take them on hand-to-hand. He was almost immediately joined by Batman, and together the duo took them out in a fluid harmony of interdependent action.

In the next moment, Batman was in front of Red Robin, wordlessly removing Dick from his grasp and carrying him bridal-style with no visible effort. Dick accordingly succumbed, yet again, to complete unconsciousness and Batman, as expressionless as ever, nodded toward his escape route and Tim and Damian, now both helping the encumbered Jason, followed swiftly after him.

* * *

The ride in the Batmobile was eerily silent. Tim and Damian broke off once outside to drive the bikes back, leaving only a slumbering Dick and a begrudgingly compliant Jason alone with Bruce. As usual, the latter offered no commentary or opening for any kind of discussion, and with jovial socializing usually in Dick's domain, the only two conscious crime-fighters could only sit in excruciatingly awkward silence.

Jason could hardly recall how long it had been since him and Batman were on comfortable speaking terms—it had been since before his reanimation. Ever since then, the two were on perpetually rocky footing, undulating back and forth between insincere truces, forced cooperation, heated feuds, and intermittent periods of passive-aggressive silence. With Red Hood's preoccupation in his own vigilantism syndicate, using guns and homicidal strategies no less, there was little leeway in which he could afford connections with his surrogate "family." Unless it was at Dick's behest, and even that was questionable at best.

Jason could only look out the window, cross-armed, counting the minutes down to when they would return to the Batcave and Alfred would look him over so that he could return home, far away from his acrimonious father figure. He hadn't even bothered demanding to be dropped off at his own place; no reason to waste his breath.

He wasn't sure how long it passed before he spoke up, low and vitriolic, failing to anticipate his own quip. "Noticed you weren't there when the travelling circus first came to town," he deadpanned, still looking out the window. "Had something better to do?"

Bruce didn't respond, only focusing intently on the road. Dick was laying across the backseat, his head secured on Jason's lap. One of Jay's hands hovered over the elder's forehead to keep his head from jostling with the movements of the car.

Ordinarily, Jason would have indignantly assumed that Bruce's silence was contemptible; him just being his normal, passive-aggressive, broody self. But when he looked away from the window and caught a glimpse of Bruce's eyes in the rear-view mirror, he thought he sensed something else.

He dismissed the impression and looked back out the window.

* * *

Damian never passed up an opportunity to give one of his cohorts crap if he felt it was warranted. And he often felt it was warranted. "That was a nice plan back there," he said into his comm. as he and Tim rode their bikes adjacent to each other on a largely empty avenue. "Nearly caught, saved only by Father showing up at a convenient time, but you wouldn't listen to me. We're fortunate for him showing up when he did."

Damian usually ruffled Tim's feathers with ease, leading to the countless arguments they had. But, strangely, the older detective didn't reply this time. Damian looked over after a moment, irritated at the silence; he despised feeling ignored.

"Drake?"

Still, Tim didn't respond. Damian couldn't read his expression behind the helmet, but, somehow, he knew better than to probe. He looked forward, allowing himself to seethe in solitude.

Meanwhile, Tim was lost in deep concentration. The same feeling that forewarned him about Dick's and Jason's "night off" returned in a full blow, telling him once again that something about this situation wasn't right—beyond the obvious, that there were kidnappers without an identified motive on the loose who were hanging out in an abandoned warehouse and could very well relocate in the foreseeable future now that they were aware that high-profile vigilantes were on their case.

There was something more. Something about that place, those people, that sat poorly with him in such a way that he didn't usually feel about wayward criminals.

Regardless, all he could do at the moment was drive.

* * *

 **Looks like there's a little miscommunication of sorts going on here. What did Clark tell Bruce? What's up with Tim's discomfiture about this whole thing? Stay tuned.**


End file.
